


A Prayer for Those We Love

by inquisitorsmabari



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Healing, Post-Game, Post-Trespasser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 17:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14265945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitorsmabari/pseuds/inquisitorsmabari
Summary: The Inquisitor has returned, but he injured, badly. Cassandra stays by his side to look after him as he heals, hoping that one day he will wake up.





	A Prayer for Those We Love

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first of my prizes from my spring giveaway gifted to norroendryd.tumblr.com.

To the outside world, Cassandra was fierce, strong, a raging tempest who tore through the world with fire in her eyes and a storm in her veins. She was iron made flesh, with a heart as strong as the steel in her blade. Unbreakable, unstoppable, strong.

But when she was with him, she was soft feather down, a meadow in spring, sunlight falling on a field of flowers. Her heart was made of glass, transparent in its capacity to love, but fragile. And when she crashed through that eluvian to find him face down in the dirt, his pointed ears crushed against the earth, it broke, shattering into a million tiny pieces which escaped her body as tears, tears which tore her skin to shreds as they poured down her face like a torrent of sharp knives.

The tears no longer fell, but the void was still there, where her heart should be. It gnawed at her, enveloping her in a cruel darkness that threatened to overwhelm her. But the tempest remained strong, and she wouldn't let a simple thing like grief bring her down.

As her love slept away his pain in the most comfortable bed the divine could offer, she didn't stop. She sharpened his weapons, fixed the holes in his armour with a clumsy hand, polished the metal of his breastplate, his gauntlets, his helm, until they shone as bright as the midday sun. She scrubbed the blood out of his clothes with her own hand, working at the stains again and again until a fresh blood blotted the fabric, blood which seeped out of the newly formed cracks on her knuckles, which gave her a nasty snarl as they proclaimed their victory over her.

But she didn't stop, didn't back down. It wasn't in her nature. Instead, she found other jobs to do. She fluffed up the pillows beneath his head every morning, had the sheets changed as often as the servants would let her, washed his skin with a soft cloth amid the protest of the medics. But she didn't listen to them, didn't listen to anyone. All she listened to was the ragged breath and the steady heartbeat of the man she loved.

Amongst all this, there was one ritual that she kept to with an almost religious fervour. On the first morning of his sleep, she marched out to the gardens to greet the fresh spring air and the triumphant light of the sun as it blessed the stone walled garden with its warmth. Against the bright blue sky, the flowers planted elegantly around the palace garden exhibited a cacophony of vibrant colour that drew her eye: pinks, yellows, whites,all bringing a burst of spring colour to the drab white walls.

She gathered a selection. She wasn't any good at colour matching, very little thought went into the balance of one type over another and the result was rather garish. But they brought something to that cold, dark room that her lover slept in. Light, colour, hope. Hope that he would wake before they wilted and the first thing he saw would be the bold, bright colours of spring flowers. Except he didn't.

One day, she went into his room, as she did every morning, with a smile on her face, hoping that he would be awake to see her smile. Except he never was. But she busied herself with her work, as she always did, sitting by his bedside with the gauntlet she was patching up, humming a tune she didn’t even know the name of. Until she looked up, her eyes falling on the vase of flowers she had placed at his bedside, which had turned their vibrant heads towards the ground, exhausted with the effort of standing for so long as their stems collapsed pitifully over the lip of the vase.

That wouldn’t do. She would have to get more.

She did get more. But they wilted too, almost at the same time that she began to run out of jobs to do. And so she sat in silence, staring at the second set of wilting flowers because it was preferable to the alternative: watching him. He had always been small, skinny, how many times had she told him to eat more? How many times had he laughed? _I’m an elf, we’re all skinny_. Well now he was more than that. It was like he was wasting away before her eyes, disappearing slowly into the soft covers as the light feather down blossomed around him, his life wilting away like the flowers she insisted on bringing him.

She should get some more. But would it be worth it? Would he even wake to see them?

_Yes, yes he would_. She chanted the words like a prayer as she grasped the dying flowers with a strong grip, tearing them out of their vase and spraying water all over the floor, the words turning over in her mind again and again like the prayers that she had lived off of for all these years as she stormed out of the palace and into the garden. Because that was what it was to her, this silly ritual. It was a prayer, each flower picked with clumsy hands as her faith in him grew stronger, more insistent, filling her with a passion beyond anything else. She had to do this for him, she _needed_ to. For her sake as much as his.

The third set of flowers to adorn his bedside were stronger, brighter, more vibrant than ever, filling the room with a dazzling brightness that filled the void of her heart with a sense of pride that threatened to burst from her very being. She smiled at her efforts, revelling in the beauty of her own, personal, prayer. But it wasn’t quite enough, no, something was missing.

She took the strongest looking flower she could see, a flower of pure white with petals as large as a small mouse, and placed it carefully on the chest of her lover, which rose and fell so slowly that she could have sworn it was almost unmoving. Taking his remaining hand in hers, she clutched the fingers and carefully placed them around the stem, enclosing the final piece of her prayer in his delicate grasp, before sealing it with the lightest brush of her lips on his cold skin.

That was it. That was all she could do. And she left.

But once the door was closed, and the room descended into a semi-darkness once again, the elf’s eyes opened.


End file.
